Purpose :
The pathological change of retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells is one of the main reasons for the development of retinal degenerative diseases (RD). Thus, cultured RPE cells are proper cell model to study the etiology of RD in vitro. However, such cultured RPE cells easily undergo epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) that results in changes of morphological characteristics and functions of the cells. Thus a new cell culture condition was created to restore and maintain mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET) of the cultured RPE cells

Conclusions :
This study provides a simple and reliable method to reverse dedifferentiated pRPE cells into epithelialized phenotype, which is more appropriate for studying RD in vitro, and suggests that MET of other cell types might be induced by a similar approach.

This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.